Translation schedule. Remember that according to the release schedule translatable messages might be subject to change until the User Interface Freeze on the week of the 23rd of February.

Language packs. During the development cycle, language packs containing translations will be released twice per week except for the freeze periods. This will allow users and translators to quickly see and test the results of translations.

Ubuntu App Developer Week – Day 2 Summary

Making Your App Speak Languages with Launchpad Translations

In this session we learned how to link up an app that already has internationalization support to Launchpad Translations, so that it is exposed to Launchpad’s extensive community of translators who’ll effectively make your app speak almost any language. From setting up code hosting for a seamless integration, to setting up the translations settings to tips and tricks for best practices, the presentation should give developers a good grasp of how to start getting their apps translated and ready to reach a wider audience.

The Making of Unity 2D

An interactive and popular session, in which Florian started describing the main goal behind the Unity 2D project: to run on platforms that do not provide accelerated OpenGL. It essentially is an implementation of the main Unity user interface using the Qt toolkit and the QML declarative language, while reusing the backend technologies from Unity. From there he went on describing the Unity 2D architecture and the release policy, pointing out to the Unity 2D daily PPA, for those testers who want to be on the bleeding edge., and wrapped up answering the questions from the audience.

Making App Development Easy: Gedit Developer Plugins

Starting off with a description of Gedit plugins, their purpose and how to install them, Curtis delved into the general-purpose plugins and the developer plugins (click to install) plugins, explaining how to set them up and his recommended choice of plugins to convert Gedit in the perfect programming editor. The highlights included the GDP Bazaar integration plug in, which allows working with the bzr source revision control system and others (Subversion, Mercurial, Git), as well as the Source Code Browser plugin, a class and function browser based on Exuberant Ctags.

Publishing Your Apps in the Software Center: The MyApps Portal

In another session devoted to the app developer strategy, Anthony told us all about the MyApps webapp developers can use to submit their applications to the Software Center. Available on https://myapps.developer.ubuntu.com, it started off as the need to automate the submission of commercial apps to the Software Centre, expanding to a full-blown online portal that can now tackle any type of submission. He then walked the audience through the 5-step process to send an app for review, including all the necessary metadata and payment details. Once an app has been submitted, it needs to be packaged (if it wasn’t already) and reviewed before being published. Hinting to Jonathan Lange’s session on day 1, Anthony explained that they are looking at providing an automated process for packaging, with the intention of removing the last big remaining manual process.

Publishing Your Apps in the Software Center: The App Review Board

Complementing the previous session, Stéphane explained how libre+gratis apps can get into the Software Centre and what the App Review Board’s (ARB) role is in that process. He focused on how the Board reviews applications and how other types are distributed in Ubuntu. The types of apps reviewed by the ARB are small, lightweight apps, usually of the type created by Quickly (check out the sessions on Quickly on Thursday!). The next upcoming changes in the way this applications are reviewed will most probably include them being submitted through the MyApps online portal and them being made more secure by wrapping them in a container based on AppArmor or Arkose (or a combination of them).

The Day Ahead: Upcoming Sessions for Day 3

We’re starting to see more and more apps that integrate with Unity. Unity Mail is a cool app that allows you to stay up to date with your web mail directly from your desktop. It supports any IMAP server, but right now it works best with Gmail, along with notifications, message counts, quicklists and more. Dmitry Shachnev will tell us about its features and how he put the application together.

Launchpad has many awesome features. This time around Jelmer Vernooij will be explaininghow to set up recipe builds for your project in Launchpad, so that users can get the latest updates easily packaged on a daily basis, so that they can install them at a click of a button and can test them and make the feedback loop as short as possible.

Ubuntu One is starting to be everywhere, and it even has its own developer programme. The Ubuntu One website already provides lots of information to developers, and to make it even more clear, Stuart Langridge will walk you through the available Ubuntu One APIs you can use to make your application cloud-ready.

One of the easiest and more visual ways for your apps to blend in with Unity is for it to integrate with the Launcher. Counts, progress indication, quicklists… are an elegant and simple wayto provide feedback to users. Jason Smith knows all about Launcher integration, and he’s really looking forward to share it with us!

Vala is a powerful programming language that allows modern programming techniques to be used to write applications that run on the GNOME runtime libraries, particularly GLib and GObject. Luca Bruno is part of the team that develops Vala itself, and will be introducing us to the first steps to get started with Vala with the universal “Hello world” app becoming “Hello Vala!”.

After the first language packs have now been generated, I am pleased to announce that our current development release, Ubuntu Oneiric, is now open for translation:

Translation schedule. Remember that according to the release schedule translatable messages might be subject to change until the User Interface Freeze on the week of the 25th of August.

Language packs. During the development cycle, language packs containing translations will be released twice per week except for the freeze periods. This will allow users and translators to quickly see and test the results of translations.

Danilo told us all about the progress on upstream integration work in Launchpad and explained more in detail the part which has just been freshly? implemented for Ubuntu: better translation imports from upstream projects.

But that’s not all! This week comes packed with translations content, as I got interviewed by Jono and had the opportunity to talk a bit about our amazing translation community.

It’s been a great week here in Dallas, but all good things come to an end. Next week back in business from home and we’ll leave the space to the Launchpad folk to discuss their master plan during the Launchpad Thunderdome. Rock on.